December 03, 2007

Muhammad Saleem is a
regular guy. He recently graduated from college. He works in the online space.
He enjoys offbeat news items. He blogs.

So what makes him worthy of
mention?

Saleem, or rather
“msaleem,” is considered to be the one of the most influential users on
Digg.com, with over 1,000 popular Diggs to his credit. And that makes the
22-year old a virtual god in the social media space.

One of the fundamental
reasons for his rise to prominence is the fact that he was an early adopter,
joining Digg.com back in September of 2005. But there’s more to it than that.
The Chicago
native embodies what social networking is supposed to be all about; meeting
people and making friends.

And how do I know this?
Because he told me.

Now I’m most definitely not would
you would call an early adopter over at Digg, having finally registered back in
February of this year. So how did I manage to land an audience with Muhammad?
No, it’s not because of my marketing and/or networking prowess. It’s because I
recently Dugg one of his submissions and took a second to review his profile. I
noticed that he encourages folks to reach out to him via IM, so I decided to
give it a shot.

Sure enough, Muhammad
responded to my initial IM and we struck a brief conversation. It basically
went like this:

I asked him some questions
about his professional and personal life. He added me to his IM. I tried to
impress him with my SEO resume (don’t think it worked) and we talked a little
bit about how difficult it is to convince corporate clients about the virtues
of both social media and original content. After a period of inactivity, I told
him that it was time for Monday Night Football and he told me it was time for
dinner, and that was it.

Frankly, it was refreshing
to know that an individual that is so well-known in social media circles would
take the time to talk with a virtual nobody. Furthermore, when I tried to
explain why I was randomly sending him an IM, he responded by saying, “not at
all random. I get this all the time, and enjoy it : - )”

Now at this point, some of
you might have your cynicism censors firing off at full tilt. You might think
that that Mr. Saleem’s approach is a thinly veiled attempt to further expand
his virtual social empire, and that his motivations have little to do with actual human interaction.

I gotta tell you. I got the
opposite vibe.

If anything, it seemed as
if Muhammad was turned off by my attempts to turn the conversation into a
networking event. It was refreshing, and it has inspired me to evaluate how I
go about interacting with virtual friends and acquaintances.

November 14, 2007

Predictably, Yahoo has followed Google in revealing plans to create a create its own social network. From the NY Times:

Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks.

Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts.

We knew this was coming from Goog, and we (of course) suspected Yahoo wouldn't be far behind.

Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that.

Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. The first peek will come in early November. As we reported previously, Google is planning to “out open” Facebook with a new set of APIs that developers can use to build apps for its social network Orkut, iGoogle, and eventually other applications as well.

Aw, Jeez. Another social network. That's all I need. As if I'm not burned out enough from Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pownce, and every other social site I've joined in the last few years...Will Google's offering out-do all the above, enticing me to abandon every other community?

October 25, 2007

Facebook's been the belle of the ball since this spring, when it opened its virtual doors to one and all. Surpassing MySpace in growth, Facebook has been the subject of rumours for months, since Google and Microsoft have been vying for the social media mammoth's affections.

January 29, 2007

MarketingVox reports on rumours that Google is working on its own version of SecondLife. From the sound of things, they've been lining up teams in the worlds of "metaverses," 3-D model creation, and online gaming to rollout a virtual world with "speculation being that Google will use real-world data gathered from their existing enterprises to craft an alternate reality platform online."